Position-assisted fast handover schemes for LTE-advanced network under high mobility scenarios

Abstract

Two position-assisted fast handover schemes, scheme A and scheme B, for LTE-A system under very high mobility scenarios, are proposed, together with their performance evaluation. Scheme A is designed to reduce handover delay by making handover preparation before handover starts. Scheme B aims at reducing unnecessary handovers and improving handover success rate, by calculating the geographically best target handover cell, which makes it easier for mobile terminals to access the target cell. A system level simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of these two schemes. It is shown that, scheme A could reduce inter-site handover delay by about 50 ms, while scheme B could cut down nearly 50% of all handovers when time-to-trigger (TTT) is 0 ms. Besides, as TTT gets larger, Scheme B has much better success rate.